


The Philosophy of Looming

by SarcasmLand



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen, Knight & Squire, the word 'looming'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-05-20 05:26:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14888474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarcasmLand/pseuds/SarcasmLand
Summary: Owen's friends' Ordeals loomed in the distance. Owen's refuses to. Until it doesn't.My take on what on earth the happiest boy in existence could fear more than anything.





	1. "Leaving" as it takes too long

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you like this as much as Owen did!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is not as serious as Kel, or as dramatic as Neal (well, maybe), or as driven as Alanna. He's just Owen. He is incapable of not doing what he believes is right, and somehow, that applies to packing for a journey. Leaving the Scanran border has never been more complicated.

Three months and five days before Owen of Jesslaw’s Ordeal, and it _wasn’t_ looming in the distance like a dark shadow. Not yet, at least, but almost. He supposed it might be considered a loomer-in-training.

As Lord Wyldon's squire, he might be one too.

 

* * *

 

At breakfast on Monday, Lord Wyldon told him to be packed by noon.

At noon, Lord Wyldon told him to leave the bag of interesting sticks and the ' _jolly'_  books he had taken from headquarters and repack so that his remaining belongings would fit in just _one_ bag.

At breakfast on Tuesday, Lord Wyldon told him to leave the hay he had taken from the stable and the ' _jolly'_  books he had taken from headquarters and asked if Owen needed to go back to page training and learn how to count again, because he was quite sure that he had said _one_ bag and not two, although, yes, two was better than six.

At noon, Lord Wyldon demanded to know where the foot-long plank Owen was carrying had come from, and directed him to put it back into the mess hall floor, and after that to please not attempt packing again until their horses were groomed and fed and the tack cleaned.

On Wednesday morning, Lord Wyldon gave Owen _one_ bag and told him to pack, and no, he could not fill that empty potato sack with any ' _jolly keepsakes_ ', in the name of Mithros, _one_ means _one_!

On Thursday at noon, Lord Wyldon told him to return the forks, dirt clods and the books he had taken from headquarters to their rightful places, and by that point, they had lost enough time that they ought to practice Owen’s sword work.

On Friday morning, Owen stood waiting by the gate, one arm around his new horse, who was carrying _one_ bag. Lord Wyldon cast a very suspicious look at it, but it looked just as it had the night before - only Owen’s mask of innocence was there to inspire such a glance.

It was when he saw the pack horses coming that Lord Wyldon turned his most livid glare on his squire. If Owen wanted those books so badly, he snapped, he could dismount and carry them himself. As Mastiff’s gates closed behind them, one boy walked among the riders, jollily bearing his one bag in one hand - and _one_ box in the other.


	2. Doubts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A mini chapter! There will probably be more.

Two months and one day before his Ordeal, and it still refused to loom. It loitered about in every corner of his mind, though. It ought to be looming at this point, he thought. Maybe it couldn’t loom like a dark thundercloud, but Owen would have settled for one of those fluffy ones. _Is there something wrong with me?_ He thinks when they stop to camp. He’s been ready to say that it looms in the distance since he first arrived in Corus at the age of ten, but it hasn’t.

Two months before his Ordeal, and they were no longer anywhere near the Scanran border. He was glad that this winter would not be frigid and icy for him, but the jolly cold of Corus, and the palace. He hoped it would loom by then.


	3. Spidrens

One month before his Ordeal, they run into a band of spidrens. The familiar sight of bloodthirsty Immortals stokes his anger. Owen kills two before a stray piece of web catches his leg and drags him into a riverbed. The healer fixes his arm and his ankle and his ribs. Owen sleeps for a day. They tie him to his horse. Atop a horse that isn’t Happy, he tosses and turns.

 

When Owen wakes up, the Ordeal finally looms like an angry cloud. He has nightmares about the door to the Chamber. He thinks of Kel. The Chamber gave her a mission and glory! That could happen to him, too. That would be jolly.

He doesn’t believe himself. Instead, he tries to do anything that does not involve staying still. He scouts and he hunts, scarfing down meals as quick as possible so he can absorb himself in washing his bowl and fork and knife and spoon, and anyone else’s if they’ll let him. Lord Wyldon guesses the source of his squire’s worry, and only stops him from volunteering to do absolutely _everything_ when Owen wants to stand watch all night, at which point he shakes the boy by the shoulders and says that if the stiff-as-a-shield Stump could survive the Ordeal, an imbecile of a boy who can’t stop smiling should have no trouble, _as long as he gets some sleep_. It’s not the words that reach Owen - it’s the fact that Wyldon knows what they call him.


	4. Jewels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a tale as old as time. Or fate. Or Whatever that room controls...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there are a lot of short chapters, but a bigger one is coming up!

Two weeks and four days before his Ordeal, Lord Wyldon gives the speech about it. He says the Chamber is a cutter of jewels. Owen vaguely remembers the words from when he was eight, and sitting on his uncle’s lap. His uncle did have strong ties to the Gemcutter’s Guild, so Owen hadn’t registered what he’d actually been talking about. Now he knows. He wonders why everyone likes this explanation so much. He asks.

“The will of the Chamber is one of the few things you’re _actually_ not supposed to question, Jesslaw.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The _next_ one is longer. I promise.

Two days before his Ordeal, Owen finds himself wishing his friends were there. Midwinter feasts are jolly, but not as much so when something is looming in your mind as much as this does. Neal would say the the worst possible thing right now, and Kel would give everyone bread to hit the older boy with.


	6. One Day More

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am extraordinarily sorry for the title's reference to my favorite earworm. Well, not really sorry. Anyway, it's appropriate.

Owen spends the day before his Ordeal in all his favorite places. He starts at the library and walks through the palace, through the pages’ quarters, classrooms and yards. He stops to stare at the door to his old room. He flips anxiously through the pages of his favorite books in the library his old study group used. He looks up at the sky from the courtyard where they first faced down Joren. He walks through the stables and realizes he remembers exactly where Happy’s stall was. There’s another horse there now.

By lunchtime, Owen is back in his room, writing letters to everyone he can think of, dead or alive, horse or human. He puts them in a box and leaves it on his desk. Then he flops onto his bed and stares up at the ceiling until his eyes are sore.

 

* * *

 

When Lord Wyldon comes in, he has a vague idea of what his squire has put in the box. He has an inkling that his own name might be written on an envelope in there, and he _really_ hopes he’ll never have to read its contents - Owen can get overly passionate when it comes to his own death, and his knightmaster knows it. So Lord Wyldon finds the friends Owen has in the vicinity - for the most part, cooks and their dogs the boy had befriended, other than the squire’s own cousins and sister. While they’re dragging the squire out of bed, Wyldon goes to his house in the city and knocks on the door to a room he has been forbidden from entering by his teenage daughter. The look on her face tells him that if she is wondering what is in the box on Owen’s desk even though she hasn’t seen it. It also tells him that if Owen dies tonight, without speaking to her first, she will murder her father as he sleeps, most likely from a sleeping spell she would put in his food.

“I can’t even _speak_ to him.”

“No.”

“Does he know I’m in the city?”

“No."

“And why not, in the name of the Goddess?”

“He can’t be distracted before his Ordeal.”

“ _Distracted_. After hearing you people talk about that room all his life, I'd think Squire Owen would want nothing more right now than to have some distractions _._ ”

“You can write him a letter.”

 

Margarry of Cavall turns on her heel and slams the door in her father's face. A few seconds later, he hears the scratching of pen against paper.

 

Wyldon returns to the palace with an overly-heavy envelope that he drops off at his squire’s rooms and hopes Owen won’t read between the lines of its contents - the squire can’t know that Margarry’s in Corus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only the actual Ordeal to go!  
> I don't know when the Ordeal will arrive, but I'll try to get it up by the end of the summer. That's because I'm getting it beta-ed because I'm not quite sure. I'm also in a different timezone than the friend I sent it to, so I don't know when she'll get it / actually read it.


	7. In the Chamber

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, SkiaShadow for betaing this chapter.
> 
> Hope you like it!

The stone door slams behind him.

There is darkness. And then there is light. Faint light, but light all the same. Under the cover of the sunrise, bandits have attacked Jesslaw. Owen is five again, hiding behind a guard tower as he watches his sister with wide eyes. As she ignores the ever-shrinking distance between her and the edge of the castle wall, Fiona wields a stick against the polished staffs of the raiders. She’s only just been accepted into the Riders. She has little to no training in actual weaponry and fighting. And no one knows that she and Owen have snuck out of their beds to watch the sun rise. But just before she shoved Owen into his hiding place, she’d looked into his eyes and whispered the siblings’ unofficial motto: “ _Ignore the odds, Owen_ ,” and now she’s doing just that as she jabs this way and that, never ignoring the opportunity to aim for a **vital** organ or two if she gets it. But suddenly, the bandit closest to Owen has an opening. He wears a satisfied snarl to go with his ragged clothes and torn boots as he knocks Fiona’s stick out of her hands. It spirals off the edge of the wall, and Fiona, forgetting where she is, dives after it. Owen runs to the edge, arms outstretched, only to see the remains of his sister splattered on the ground far below. He spins around to see the point of a spear coming right at him-- _No!_  he reminds himself, clenching his fists as the spear comes nearer. _No, that’s not what happened!_ He slowly but surely recalls the real memory. It is a painful process, and slower than usual, but eventually, he sees again the moment when father appeared, at the last second, to run the men right through both their chests, two _in-and-out_ s in quick succession. And they ran back to the castle together, only to find-- the Chamber skips the running and goes right to when the bedchamber door was thrust open, revealing Mother on the floor. Dead. Run through with the same _woosh_ - _woosh_ of a sword that the Lord Jesslaw himself had used just seconds earlier.

This is the part where five-year-old Owen screamed and cried and vomited the remnants of last night's dinner, the last dinner he ever sat next to his mother at, but this is the Chamber of the Ordeal, and there is no crying or screaming or vomiting allowed. And then, without warning, there is the pyre where Happy was burned, and the dogs and cats and people who gave their lives for a noble quest and a noble cause, but the battle wasn't Jolly, not like in the books.

Books; such wonderful things, but when you tried to bring them to life, they failed you. They were destroyed. Destruction. Darkness. Happy, the dogs, the cats, the people, Blayce’s castle, everything disintegrates into dust. Owen is lying on his back on a dead, flat plain, breathing heavily. He is exhausted, but his years of training, under Lord Wyldon no less, kick in. He ignores the fact that his hands are sore from clenching and his eyes from blinking back tears and braces himself for the next attack. Nothing comes.

It's almost as if the Chamber is thinking, a notion which both relieves and terrifies Owen. But soon enough, he's in the practice yards, and Lord Wyldon is demanding a sword fight for Margarry’s hand. Owen’s sword is all too heavy and much shakier than usual in his tired hands. He knows that winning is impossible: he's never beaten Wyldon, and he probably never will. His knight-master’s eyes are like iron: merciless and unrelenting.

“Guard,” orders Chamber-Wyldon, and Owen guards, but at the same time, he’s disobeying everything Wyldon’s ever taught him about swordfighting and thinking about something completely different. _This never happened, and it never will_ , he thinks at Chamber-Wyldon. _The real Lord Wyldon respects his daughter more than that._ He repeats those words over and over in his head, making it impossibly difficult for the muscle memory he’d thought was infallible to kick in. Chamber-Wyldon’s moves are quick and precise, and there is a heart-rattling clang every time their swords meet. _Besides,_ he thinks - hard - at whatever runs this place, _he’s already accepted that we’re in love._

 _But will he allow it?_ Asks an eerie voice. Owen barely blocks another potentially lethal blow.

 _It’s Lord Wyldon_ , he thinks. _If he didn’t approve, I’d be dead already._

There is silence for a while. The “practice courts,” along with Chamber-Wyldon, have faded. Owen is standing on the plain again. He seems to wait for hours as the Chamber throws his greatest weakness at him: standing still. His mind fills with plenty of things that could go wrong and plenty of terrible things, but Owen is nineteen, a hardened warrior, and somehow hasn’t lost hope. Hope is the shield he uses to deflect those thoughts, and perhaps it works, because when the Chamber finally speaks again, it says,

 _Well, then, Owen of Jesslaw._ One more memory - or rather, the feeling of it - pops up. It is his first week of page training, and he is rushing into a fight to defend his defender. He is as untrained and unprepared as Fiona was when she was fighting for him, but he is ready to win.

And then it is now, and Owen is standing on a cold stone floor.

_You have ignored the odds yet again._

 

* * *

 

As the door opens to the waiting crowd and the initial blinding light relents, Owen’s eyes are immediately drawn towards his stoic (former!) knightmaster and the (formerly!) nervous girl jumping up and down beside him. There’s excitement and love in her eyes, as well as that look she gets when she's just won an argument, while her father's eyes show resignation - and perhaps a little pride? She is holding a paper. Owen’s whole family is standing behind Wyldon and Margarry, Fiona looking on with a proud smirk. Owen is confused for a moment, but then, just as the chamber door closes behind him, he hears one last whisper:

_Congratulations on your betrothal._

The last thing Owen remembers before falling asleep on his feet is Wyldon wrapping the blanket around him and Margarry shoving a pen into his hands.


	8. Not Really Anything, But Technically An Epilogue?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, SkiaShadow for betaing this chapter, too!

      When Sir Owen of Jesslaw is knighted that afternoon, he signs his name. _J_ _ust_ after remembering that he needs to receive his shield first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Owen and the Chamber, and it always seemed that it was impossible for a kid like him to fear anything so much it could be used against him... but you never know. I do believe, though, that even at 19 or however old he was when he got his shield, he is still that bewildered & bruised boy in the library, delving into a fight to do the right thing, at heart.  
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
